Deal with it?

Pain or Emotional scarring from growing up with a severely abusive family life...

To face it and deal with it, or to push it back and try to forget it. I guess that really depends on where you are, as an individual, in your life and the circumstances surrounding that pain.


This question, in respect to myself, brings to my mind's eye a picture:

It's Sunday morning.

A little boy stands in front of a huge dam, the wind whipping his platinum blond hair. His face - nearly expressionless but with a hint of sadness in the slack of his cheeks and ever so slight furrow of his brow. His sky blue eyes - like puddles that lead to another dimension, unseen and unknown, but just beyond the edge of perception.

The blowing wind tugs at his tattered clothes. His plaid pants, patched in places, hang off him obscuring his thin body. His dirty shirt and sweater vest worn nearly through from years of use beyond his age.

His right arm hangs slack at his side. His other arm reaches to a small crack in the dam where his finger lightly touches the trickle of water that passes and flows down to a tiny creek that wanders away. Down it goes, through the sleepy town below where families slumber as the early morning sunlight peeks through and warms them in their bliss.

High above him the shadow of the rim of the dam holds the boy out of the sun's warming rays. The wind-swept waves of the reservoir cast sprays of mist high enough to create tiny momentary rainbows and reveal that the spring thaw has melted the heavy snows of winter so quickly that the lake has risen well beyond what would be considered an acceptable level.

The waters of the lake are alive with every foul and unclean beast to ever walk, swim or crawl the face of the earth. Hideous monstrosities, beyond the gates of even the most creative of human imaginations, lumber and glide in a cacophony of death and mutilation. They consume each other in their lust to sate their hunger and assert the dominance of their existence. Their greedy eyes peering over the dam and down to the town below dreaming, yearning, wishing for a time when the dam crashes down in a thunder of rushing water, concrete and steel. Sweeping them and the little boy below into the valley so they can devour its very happiness that they despise so intensely...



Like the monsters locked behind the dam, some tombs are better left unopened lest their fetid air unleash disease and pestilence upon humanity previously unimagined.

And so it is that some abusers, and abused alike, deny to themselves the memories of what they have done, and what has been done to them.

We are each individuals with differing limits and parameters of what is acceptable to be dealt with and in what measure we can bare those personal burdens.